Articles

The value of brands which push back.

3 June 2016

The cliché is that products should be silver bullets and that brands should make life as rosy as a possible. But when brands ask people to do their fair share of the work, they make a meaningful and valuable contribution to society.

Maybe the problem starts with the word, consumer. Is that all people want to be? Consumers?

Do ordinary folk want to buy their way through their lives? Do they want a visit to the mall this weekend to solve all of life’s issues? After all, in a mall you can buy status, glamour, and a sense of wellbeing. You don’t actually have to do any work to acquire those qualities; you can just take out your credit card.

When you pass billboards and fend off digital ads, that’s how things seem to be.

Many brands seem to believe think that ordinary folk, in an ideal world, would love to be Roman emperors, reclining on couches, being drip-fed the grapes of modern society.

In other words, they seem to think that people simply want to be recipients in their lives, not participants.

Consequently, brands seem to think they must be all-smiling and all-solving. Even their communication shouldn’t ask too much of the recipient.